by Baird Harper
Is this it, she thought. Is this how I die? In an overturned car on the run from my husband? There were children to save, weren’t there? Bottles of wine to drink? There were forms to fill and an orphan to adopt. There were days and years left to explain her marriage to people who lack imagination.
She opened her mouth to argue a different outcome, to claim a different fate, but no sound came out. Her cheeks felt ripped, her face hot and welling. A man had crawled halfway into the broken passenger window. Someone else’s husband. Someone else’s ongoing rationalization. “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t move. I’ve called an ambulance. I’ll stay here with you.” His breath was scotch, but she didn’t blame him for it. The red light had been hers, if memory served. For as long as memory would serve. She only wanted to explain to him her unfinished errand. She tried to speak again, but the memory of what she’d wanted to say was already skating away. An innocence had been at stake, or its loss was to be mourned. To look at the desperate face hanging off the man inside her car, it seemed that too much had happened already. To hear his sorrowful chanting—I’m here with you . . . I’m here with you . . . —was to understand that there was absolutely no going back. She closed her eyes and tried to think what it was she’d needed to say, but nothing would take full shape inside her head. Just hands without minds controlling them and errands unfinished, half a man shouting encouragement into an upside-down car. Where is your other half, she wanted to ask him. Where is mine? His hands grew dark and the streetlamps dimmed, her vision closing down. Until there was only the sound of the half-man’s chant, a tender song to carry her off, a final petition for the one thing we all want.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Robert Guinsler, who, excepting only my family, is owed the most. To Sarah Goldberg, whose guidance on this project made every page better. And to David Lamb for giving the manuscript a chance to begin with.
Thanks to Brady Udall for letting me into class. To Janet Desaulniers for letting me into school. And in particular to Jim McManus for a decade’s worth of writing advice, career perspective, and friendship without which I would be in another line of work entirely.
Thanks to Bradley Greenburg for crucial help with this manuscript. To Natalie Danford, Tonaya Thompson, Linda Swanson-Davies, and Susan Burmeister-Brown, who helped publish several of these stories before there was a book to put them in.
A not-small debt of gratitude is owed to the grandparents of my children—to Wendy and Michael Chance, to Cathy and Jim Nowacki—for granting me the time to write many of these stories in the first place. And to Garnet and Bon, during whose regular naps the rest of the book was written.
Finally, at the risk of undermining all gratitude so far described, this is Anastasia’s book. She is its muse, its sponsor, and its original editor. She is its therapist and enabler both, and the first person, myself included, who thought I should write it. If the preceding fifty thousand words has been an attempt on my part to sound clever or artful, I submit this last sentence as a direct item. This book is for Anastasia.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© CHRIS OCKEN
Baird Harper’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Tin House, StoryQuarterly, and the Chicago Tribune. His stories have been anthologized in the 2009 and 2010 editions of Best New American Voices, 40 Years of CutBank, and New Stories from the Midwest 2016, and have won the 2014 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and the 2010 Nelson Algren Literary Award. He teaches writing at Loyola University and the University of Chicago.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Baird Harper
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First Scribner hardcover edition August 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-5011-4735-7
ISBN 978-1-5011-4737-1 (ebook)
Some of the stories from this collection have appeared elsewhere, in slightly different form: “Smalltime” in Another Chicago Magazine; “Patient History” in Glimmer Train; “In Storage” as “Intermodal” in Tin House; and “The Intervention So Far” as “Futures” on the website of the Illinois Center for the Book.